THE ABSENT MUSEUMThe Absent Museum began in the summer of 2015 as a publication concept that investigates the relationship between institutions and social practices. The series will include documentation of such topics as, marginalized feminist practices, social activism and grassroots philanthropy. Ultimately, the continuing series will form an archive to serve curatorial and art historical research.

MATERIAL-I-TYMaterial-i-ty, which in polish translates to Material-and-you, is an ongoing collection of essays aimed to evaluate psychological and cultural associations with material and recognize internal as well as external factors that occupy materiality within contemporary culture. With essays by Cara Benedetto, Farah Karapetian, Anthony Leslie and others.

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The following essays are part of an upcoming publication, Material-i-ty. Translated from polish to, Material-and-you, the bookis an attempt to evaluate the psychological and cultural associations with material and to recognize the internal as well as external factors that occupy materiality.

Anthony Leslie

A THROW OF TYPE, 2014

Text as a gas. Clouds of letters in Brownian motion. The pages of Johanna Drucker’s Stochastic Poetics (2012) may look computer-generated at first glance, but they are the result of two years of typesetting and letterpress printing. Out of the entropic noise of overprinted letters, legible texts begin to emerge. Passages from Aristotle’s Poetics. Fragmentary and altered texts from probability theory, describing stochastic processes—systems of random events that evolve in a non-linear, unpredictable fashion over time. Alongside these texts, Drucker includes her own personal observations from poetry events at L.A.C.E. (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions) and Modern Language Association. Reflecting the stochastic processes that the texts on probability describe, Drucker’s printing process involves elements of controlled chance, and every copy represents a different outcome of events. Encased in etched aluminum covers, this complex and open-ended artist’s book represents the response of an indeterminate, material, process-oriented textual practice to the question: “How does the figure of poetic language emerge from the general field of language?” Although she has explored many different modes of textual production over the years, from the hand-made to the ‘born digital’, Drucker has made particularly innovative use of letterpress printing in her artist’s books since 1972. Stochastic Poetics is to be her last book done in letterpress, and it is a remarkable feat of printing and design, as well as an engaging hybrid work of creative theory. Using the same, now outmoded technology as the artists who experimented with visual poetics in the early 20th century, Drucker reopens some unanswered questions from the avant-garde history she invokes while exploring new possibilities of visual, diagrammatic writing.

- Excerpt from Anthony Leslie’s Throw of Type, full text available in book Material-i-ty, available soon.

bio
Anthony Leslie is a librarian who lives in Los Angeles. He received his MLIS from UCLA in 2012 and wrote his thesis about the late art librarian Judith Hoffberg (1934-2009), her art journal Umbrella, and her collection of artists' books, mail art, and ephemera. He has also published writing in The Journal of Artists' Books and The Art Book Review.

Farrah Karapetian

Materiality, 2013

In art, as in many professions, I’m sure, a word comes into usage and over time its content and connotations become codified and abbreviated. “The Sublime,” for example, slips easily off of the tongues of undergrads describing pretty landscape pictures; they mean well, as if to point to an art historical theme with which they’d like their homework to be associated, and yet if The Sublime had ever been alive, it would be rolling in its grave. To be sublime, let alone The Sublime is such an elusive and wonderful thing as to exclude almost all of us almost all of the time; it is not just a category started by Friedrich and complicated by Crewdson. “Materiality”, too, is a word in constant, watered-down usage: it is bandied about as if anyone at all aware of the processes through which his or her work comes into being has the right to call these content.

-Excerpt from Farrah Karapetian’s reflections on materiality. Full text available soon, Material-i-ty.

bio
Farrah Karapetian is a Los Angeles-based artist who works with cameraless photography in a sculptural field. She believes in transparency of process, and in the capacity of photography to communicate the marks of its making. Her work raises questions of the nature of—and difference between—abstraction and representation, pictorial and sculptural space, and the experience of control and surrender. Karapetian took her BA in fine art from Yale University (2000) and her MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles (2008). She has been a MacDowell Fellow (2010) and an artist-in-residence at the Wende Museum and Archive of the Cold War (2009) and earned a Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for her blog Housing Projects (2012). Exhibitions include Good Sign, a public installation in abandoned signage for the Flint Public Art Project, funded in part by grants from Artplace and the Center for Cultural Innovation; the Orange County Museum of Art 2013 California-Pacific Triennial, curated by Dan Cameron; and LA Louver’s Rogue Wave 2013.

Cara Benedetto

DARK MATTER, 2013

I go and I check and I check and I cant not check and it’s so natural and my possibilities end because the answer hurts is not found and again

How are anticipation and anxiety related?

How is pain and fear topical? Surface construct? A warning. How many warnings exist in order to actually locate, specify, particularize the one th.

And why does she always win? Have more. It. All. Glaring. Searing fears. No self worth, okay with being the none. Nun. Loser. Am I tood old to fight. To play. Do I cut him loose. Drop it. Not gonna work. I get lost because I cant sleep

What is the material made of . what was the proof I needed. The science mind. The paper to dent. The mirror look to see the imprint skin, the dehydrated girl. The hungry girl. Madonna?

Material is proof. There’s no other reason for a wall. Without walls we will feel tremendous pain most of the time. Without walls we may feel what is always missing because The Human Desire. Empty electrical impulses. Zombie obsessed. How can we relate in precarious times. I need to make apocalypse. I am ending in my shirt sleeve.

In Croatia they don’t need yoga mats. Vesna is the coolest girl here and doesn’t need you or matt. Comfort stretches out in pain.

bio
Cara Benedetto is a New York City based artist. Benedetto has held solo shows in New York and Los Angeles, and exhibited internationally. Her work has been published with Badlands Unlimited, NY, Qui Parle, Berkeley, A tale of three cities, Berlin, and Night Papers, LA. Benedetto’s work has had recent reviews by The New York Times Magazine, Art in America, and The Art Book Review. She is a founding member of feminist collectives MADAM and H.E.N.S.

Material

Cara Benedetto, Farah Karapetian, Anthony Leslie

Material i ty, Vol.I, 2016

artist text
Material-i-ty, which in polish translates to Material-and-you, is an ongoing collection of essays aimed to evaluate psychological and cultural associations with material and recognize internal as well as external factors that occupy materiality within contemporary culture. With essays by Cara Benedetto, Farah Karapetian, Anthony Leslie and others. In production.

bio
Published by Projekt Papier.

Editions

Projekt Papier

Special Edition Tote, 2016

artist text
Project Papier is proud to launch Special Edition Totes to help raise money for organizations in Poland and the United States that fight for reproductive rights and women's health and safety. Since the beginning of 2016, the conservative Polish government has put in laws restricting such freedoms to women. Out of those barbaric political acts, the #czarnyprotest (#blackprotest) movement was born, and on October 3, 2016 thousands of Polish women, all over the country, marched dressed in black mourning the loss of their freedom to choose and against the inhumane treatment of their bodies, health and safety.

By purchasing the #blackprotest tote, you are upholding women's right to choose.

Analogue

Past

Against the Grain

May 20, 2016Women's Center for Creative Work, Los Angeles

Selection of experimental films by Polish women artists, 1970’s - present, from the Warsaw’s Museum of Modern Art’s Filmoteka archive.

Employing the medium of film as a tool for self-expression and experimentation, polish women artists working during the 1970’s established a fruitful ground for diverse ideas within artistic practices. Often times approaching film from the perspective of a sculptor, painter or photographer, and collapsing various visual mediums with happenings, performance, and public interventions, they sought to challenge the false reality represented in film and critique its subjective communication while developing their own language in structural cinema.

Art historian Dr. Izabela Kowalczyk argued, in a 1997 paper titled, Feminist motifs in Polish art that feminist artists in Poland failed to accurately respond to women's issues during its oppressive regime, and instead borrowed already existing models developed by feminist artists working in the West.

The screening features women artists whose work represents a particular momentum in the experimental and independent art filmmaking in Poland. The selected films offer a unique insight into the shifting ideologies, structures, and methods of working and communicating within, but not limited to, early Polish feminism, its revival in the 1990’s, conceptualism and the structural cinema model.

Against the Grain will feature works by Zofia Kulik, of group KwieKulik, Iwona Lemke-Konart, Natalia LL, Jolanta Marcolla, Ewa Partum and Jadwiga Singer as well as contemporary artists, Aneta Grzeszykowska, Katarzyna Kozyra and Agnieszka Polska. A reflective discussion on feminism during socialism and the magic of experimental film will follow with scholars dr. Aniko Imre and dr. Eve Oishi.

The evening will end with a participatory artwork as a performance, Open Form, Continued, directed by artist Kim Schoen, Lucy Cook and presenting Ania Diakoff.

Projekt Papier

Paper exists as a physical basis for an idea. It catches thought in its web of fibers. The tangible traps the intangible. The “material” traverses the various trajectories of our reality. When an abstract idea is laid upon, or contained within the somatic and solid state of the material, it becomes visible, it becomes itself material.

Since 2012 Projekt Papier has collaborated with artists, curators and creative thinkers across disciplines of visual art, film, writing and design to build a non-space for paper source concept experimentation. Projekt Papier’s aim is to document art practices shaping today’s community through an ongoing archive while maintaining an open discourse within artistic, art historical and curatorial practice.

Please consider making a donation – your contribution will go towards production costs of publications and special projects.

Publications:

The Absent Museum,began in the summer of 2015 as a publication concept that investigates the relationship between institutions and social practices. The series will include documentation of such topics as, marginalized feminist practices, social activism and grassroots philanthropy. Ultimately, the continuing series will form an archive to serve curatorial and art historical research.

Material-i-ty, which in polish translates to Material-and-you, is an ongoing collection of essays aimed to evaluate psychological and cultural associations with material and recognize internal as well as external factors that occupy materiality within contemporary culture. Close consideration is given to qualities of materials and the distinct entities that govern them, such as the material and immaterial, natural and cultural forces, subject/object relationships and various processes that drive their production.